SEO Techniques Following the Penguin and Panda Updates

The Google Panda and Penguin updates caused problems for many webmasters. If your site has been penalised by the updates, read on to discover a few tips to help you recover.

Google’s Penguin and Panda updates were supposed to target low-quality sites that had a lot of duplicated content or suspicious link profiles, ensuring that those sites were not dragging down the quality of search results. Sadly, many legitimate sites also got hit, either because they had a lot of site-wide links from their (legitimate) link partners or because their e-commerce sites appeared to have a lot of duplicate content thanks to product descriptions and category listings appearing on multiple pages.

The good news is that it is possible for a site to recover from a Google penalty. In fact, many sites that were hit during the initial Google ‘dance’ recovered as soon as Google updated its ranking systems. If your site is still suffering today, you may need to enlist the help of a company that provides SEO services. To prevent yourself from being hit by more penalties, you might want to pay attention to the basic SEO rules described below.

Content is King

Any good SEO services company will tell you that good content is essential for good rankings today. Changing a few keywords here and there will not be enough to help you climb in the rankings and ‘spinning’ your content is a definite no-no. Google wants unique content that has been written by real people for interested readers. These days Google is hard to fool, so do not even try. Write good content. It will pay off. Some of that content can be link bait, but plenty of it should be evergreen, informative articles too.

Say No to Old Tricks

Keyword stuffing, paid links and hidden text and links designed only to be seen by search engines are best avoided. These SEO techniques were either black hat or certainly grey hat back when they worked and now that Google is looking out for them they are most definitely dangerous to your search rankings. Today, the best way to get high-quality links is to create content that is worth linking to and to use guest blogging and social media to spread the word about your website.

Put the User First

Your site should be designed from the ground up to be user-friendly. This means easy navigation, quick loading times and engaging content above the fold. Having an easy-to-use website will keep your bounce rate low and make Google see your website in a more positive light. It also helps to have a strong social media presence. Talk to your users and build up a community around your site.

SEO consultants can help you improve the coding of your page, tweak your layout and build up a good link profile, but you will need to make your website worth visiting. Invest time in creating good content and be sure to refresh it regularly. If your content is worth reading, visitors will follow.

AUTHOR BIO : Andrew Watson is a web developer and SEO expert from London, England. He is an expert in SEO services and link building and writes regularly about webmaster-related issues for a range of websites and blogs.

About Debajyoti Banerjee

Debajyoti Banerjee is Founder & CEO at Seven Boats Info-System- a leading strategic Internet Marketing company, Digital Marketing Trainer, Entrepreneur, Web Strategist & Internet Marketing Consultant in Kolkata area, India. Deba helps other businesses to transform their online presence, to attract new leads and to convert their prospects by his expert web consultancy. Get in touch with him on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter